Sunday, February 16, 2014

The Witching Well

Lou Cameron and Rocco Mastroserio collaborated on two mindlessly fun tales from the June 1952 issue of The Beyond #12, (sometimes it really is all about the art) --I'll have them both for you over the next few posts, as well as the fun Ace filler one-pagers and maybe even the other stories from this issue, we'll see how things go...

11 comments:

A really wordy story, almost like reading the transcript of a radio show.

"One of my ancestors, the first owner of this house, practiced black magic with the aid of mystic candles made from bat's eggs and strands of hangman's rope for the wicks!" Wait a second, bats don't lay eggs!

Vera seemed to be wearing some kind of neck band on a couple of panels on page two. Was it to cover the bat shaped mark? But she isn't wearing it on the first panel of page one. Also, Roy mentioned in the apartment that Vera's voice sounded differently, but didn't say that at the farmhouse. Does that mean that that really was Vera at the farmhouse at the beginning of the story? And if it wasn't Vera, does that mean that the witch removed the neck band at the apartment and changed her voice? Why would she do that? It's almost like the creators chose to change the threat from a family curse to an actual witch after they had already started to make the story.

I found funny how, on page three, panel four, the witch just jumps head first into the well.

"No! No! That enchanted dagger is the only weapon that can kill me!" Then you probably shouldn't have told him that. And didn't you already fall on the dagger on the fifth panel of page four?

It was a good looking story. I was entertained. Like a certain wise man said: "sometimes it really is all about the art".

Lots of twists and turns in this story, its like the plot changed with each page.

I have seen many of the one page stories/one page wonders before, they sometimes tell the story better than could be told in four or five pages. Like all stories, one pagers are hit or miss, but they are good filler even if the artwork is less than stellar.

As for the story, yeah, it's a little schizo, but I do like the clean square art and I am happy to be solidly back in the territory of creative precode coloring techniques. And silliness, for that matter. By the way: Bats, like all mammals, totally have eggs. They just don't lay them--making their eggs pretty hard to harvest and, possibly, too small to cook with.

I'm pretty sure that shovel on the cover can be viewed as almost an optical illusion, to some it might be turned the wrong way, to others it's correct... it looks fine to me, but after Brian mentioned it I can see how it looks wonky now too.

How's everyone like their vampire bat eggs anyway? I like mine bloody-side up!

You know what, you're totally right Karswell. Now that you mention it, the shovel does have a way of switching back and forth between concave and convex whenever I shut my eyes and open them again.

Still, the contextual information in the rest of the picture kind of supports the way we saw it at first: that the business end of the shovel, the scoop, is facing away from us; and that the swing is following through as the dirt travels into the background. It's about how the light lines-up with that shadow of the handle on the man's red sweater. That shovel would have a shadow in the bottom lip if we were seeing the concave surface.

I enjoyed the cover too. You don't expect people to look exactly the same on the cover as they do in the story, but this is the first time I can think of that one of the differences was a handlebar mustache.

One of the few accidentally funny things (to me) is that famous horror comic exclamation "AAIIEE!!" towards the end. The thing that makes it funny is the matter-of-fact look on Vera's face when she says it.

It's true that bats don't lay eggs (except in the sense that Mr. Cavin mentions), but if you're even the slightest bit into herpetology, you know that rattlesnakes don't lay them either, which doesn't prevent "rattlesnake eggs" from showing up in places like novelty shops. That makes the idea of "bats eggs" almost easy to "roll with."

"...the capital of online comic book horrors... saying "Not the best story THOIA has run" is a bit like saying "one of Beethoven's lesser symphonies!"---Quasar Dragon

"...the object of all horror chicks' wet dreams... a comixkaze of awesome!"---Killer Kittens

"...an online repository of vintage comic fear fare where individual stories from long out-of-print issues are posted in high resolution, page by page. For a fan of EC, Atlas and other Silver Age-era comic companies, it is pure heaven (and hell)..."---Bryan Reesman (Attention Deficit Delirium)